Recasting Swedish Historical Identity
Erik Örjan Emilsson
Abstract
That the concept of Swedish identity and its relation to Swedish history is deeply
problematic has become increasingly obvious over the last few years. Several books,
articles and a TV series have been devoted to such questions. In this article the problem
is discussed within the context of two contrasting standpoints: on the one hand a
Romanticist nationalist construction of an ‘ancient racial community’ (a myth recently
dissected by Maja Hagerman), and on the other, an identification with the present and
the future, rather than with the past. This tendency has been characteristic of the
Swedish welfare society, and here it is discussed in connection with BerggrenTrägårdh’s analysis of the specifically Swedish combination of radical individualism
and a strong reliance on the state.
Within this context different interpretations of the ‘People’s home’ (folkhem) ideal
are discussed, and different attitudes to immigration. The article concludes that if the
dynamics of Europe depend on its diversity, then every national peculiarity may be
seen as a contribution to these dynamics. In the Swedish case: an acceptance of
perpetual change, a moderate rate of inequality, a deep aversion to warfare, a tradition
of constant negotiation and an ambition to search for points of consensus.
Recasting Swedish historical identity
In a country which has transformed itself from one of the poorest countries of Europe,
to one of the richest; from an extremely militarized society to a world record holder in
unbroken peace, and from a draconically enforced religious conformity to an almost
complete secularization1 – in such a country we should not be surprised to notice a lack
of consensus about national identity, about what it means to be Swedish.
In this article the recently reawakened interest in such questions is discussed in the
context of two competing traditions.
During the later part of the 20th century – and in some respects already from the
30’s – Swedish nationalism tended to become a less and less fashionable subject. The
programmatic modernism and international reputation of the Swedish welfare state
encouraged a focus on the present and the future, rather than the past, and on the
international context rather than the internal. Despite the rather low intensity of
1
Sweden as a case of extreme modernization is discussed in Emilsson: Sweden and the European Miracles:
Conquest, Growth and Voice. Göteborg 1996:10-14.
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nationalist discourse, Sweden was regularly cited as one of the few real-life examples
of the nation-state ideal before the post-communist resurgence of national separatism in
Europe2.
Are we then to conclude that Sweden’s national homogeneity was so self-evident
that it was unnecessary to assert? And that the absence of nationality problems was a
precondition for identifying with modernity?
Not really. Nationalist ideas had flourished throughout and beyond Sweden’s 19th
century, and the modernist paradigm won out only slowly. There are still traces of an
unconscious or at least unspoken nationalism in the ways many Swedes view the
world. If you are convinced that you really live in the best country in the world it
would be tactless to spell it out.
Also, on such a subliminal level of discrete nationalism old national myths have
been able to survive unexamined. And if we start to examine them, homogeneity may
appear much less self-evident. I will presently return to these aspects.
After Sweden’s hesitant and somewhat reluctant entry into the European
Communities – and likewise as a consequence of international migration – we have
been more closely confronted with people having a much more explicit and assertive
relationship with their historical pasts. This has – at long last – forced us to begin
reconsidering Swedish history and Swedish national identity. In the last year3, several
books, articles and an ambitious TV series have been devoted to questions of national
identity and related issues.
During the later 1990’s the resurgence of interest in Swedish history was becoming
obvious. When history had disappeared from the list of compulsory school subjects
within Swedish secondary education in 1991, this had only been the final step in a long
devaluation of history as an item of social necessity4. At least from the Stockholm
exhibition in 1930, and even more so after the publication of Marquis Childs’ book
Sweden: the Middle Way in 1936, Sweden had begun to enjoy a growing international
reputation as the homeland of modernity – ‘the country that shows the rest of the world
what the future will be like’, to quote a once popular American cliché.
If a nation is an ‘imagined community’ in Benedict Anderson’s famous
expression5, Sweden’s collective imagination had by this time turned its focus onto the
present and the future, rather than on its past. The conservative nationalist tradition that
had grown in strength throughout the 19th century did not give in easily, but the
identification with modernity proved to be more attractive in the long run, at least until
Sweden started to drop from its taken-for-granted top positions in international ranking
lists of economic performance, political stability and high living standards.
Paradoxically, the high scientific standards of a newer generation of Swedish historians
challenging the conservative nationalist historians during the interwar period,
ultimately may have served to undermine the public interest in history. Their
dedication to uncompromising source-criticism led them to undertake a severe
2
Normally six to eight countries used to be mentioned, including Iceland, Portugal and Albania.
This was writtwn in early 2007.
4
The devaluation of the history subject is described in Hans Albin Larsson: ‘Consigning history to the past.’
Axess Magazine 2006.
5
Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London
1983.
3
Recasting Swedish Historical Identity
193
deconstruction of national mythologies, but the paucity of early historical sources in
Sweden made large parts of Swedish history look like empty gaps after their revisions.
A lacklustre history was no match for a glorious present.
In the early 19th century, when Swedish nationalism had taken shape, the situation
had been quite the reverse. A lacklustre present was compensated for through
glorifying the past.
Today, when we are faced with the necessity of a thorough reappraisal of our latent
national myths, it is to their point of formulation we have to return.
When modern nationalisms were being constructed in the early 19th century, they
were needed to solve quite different versions of the national identity problem. Where
the French nation had to try and strike a balance between a recent revolutionary
formulation of common citizenship, and the returning principle of dynastic legitimacy6,
the British had just been confirmed in their national pride and their self-image as
international upholders of law and order. Within parts of Europe now clearly relegated
to second-rank status, German and Italian nationalists were beginning to assert
themselves on the basis of linguistic communities and dreams of resurrecting bygone
empires. Influenced by Romantic German nationalism, young Swedish poets,
journalists and historians embarked on a similar venture. But in a very different
situation.
For the early German nationalists, the linguistic and cultural community they were
striving for was, at the time, beyond their reach. Only very different political realities
would later make a German nation-state a feasible project, but in the truncated Sweden
a linguistic homogeneity which would have been unthinkable in the polyglot Swedish
Empire had already entered the domain of possibility. However, this had come about
not through victorious warfare (as when the German nation-state was finally realized,
in 1871) but through defeat, and along with it the definitive loss of Great Power status.
Therefore the bygone glory could be referred to only in very general terms, as they still
are in the words of the national anthem, but any explicit nostalgia for the Imperial Age
was evaded. The loss was still too painful. Instead these young nationalists returned to
the faraway myths that had once occupied the imaginations of the Great Power kings:
the distant Gothic origin claimed for the Swedish nation. Only this time the warlike
Goths were imagined to be the ancestors not only of royal dynasties, or aristocracies,
but of the peasantry as well. Here a new myth was taking shape, an ethnic as well as
civic nationalism claiming a bond of shared bloodlines between lords and peasants,
between kings and subjects.
This is a fiction that is still alive and kicking: the notion of a racially
homogeneous population was over the 19th century turned into a pseudoscientific basis
for Swedish national cohesion, and into an explanation of that Swedish tradition of
personal freedom which is still treasured as a national heritage. How this came about is
vividly described in Maja Hagerman’s recent book: Det rena landet. Konsten att
uppfinna sina förfäder. (”The pure country. The art of inventing one’s ancestors.”)
The poet-historian Erik Gustaf Geijer invented two national archetypes: the viking
and the odalbonde (yeoman). Geijer’s odalbonde is conceived as a hard-working small6
With the suddenly shattered dreams of forcibly leading the world into modernity thrown into the balance,
it is no wonder that the better part of a century had to be spent in the effort.
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Erik Örjan Emilsson
scale self-owning peasant, proud and independent. He is envisioned as the backbone of
Swedish society, in contrast to the impatient viking adventurer, who might yet have
been his brother. That the strong political position of Sweden’s peasantry can be
explained as an unbroken heritage from the Viking Age, is pure myth. That peasants
did have a stronger political position in Sweden than in other countries is no myth,
though, but originally, land ownership had nothing to do with it. That their early civic
status depended on land ownership, is a misconceived back projection from the 19th
century. By that time, more than a century of market-oriented agriculture had finally
segregated the peasantry into either proprietors or proletarians7. These are not
Hagerman’s arguments, however. She concentrates on the lack of archeological
evidence of an egalitarian society, and on the construction of European racism, where,
she shows, prominent Swedish scientists, historians and authors took an active and
important part.
What, then, about the presumed racial homogeneity? Hagerman shows how
archaeologists and anthropologists from a surprisingly narrow social circle – people
who were each other’s pupils or teachers, ate breakfasts together and married off their
children to each other – succeeded to create an ideal image of Sweden as an Eden of
racial purity8. This was achieved in a close dialogue with the international pioneers of
racist theory, and eventually they succeeded to sell this idea to the Swedish public
through museum exhibitions, encyclopedia articles and massive popular campaigns.
That Sweden became the first country to create an institute of Racial Biology was
therefore no inexplicable aberration, but a measure of the success of the pure-blood
lobby, and of their scientific prestige. Few people today would talk about a national
treasure of unmixed Aryan blood, but the notion of Sweden’s homogeneous population
is by no means eradicated. For instance, I have quite recently been criticized in an
international review by a Swedish professor for neglecting the importance of the
homogeneity factor in my discussions of Swedish history within a comparative
European context.
To evaluate the realism of the homogeneity notion, it is necessary to look even
further back in history. To the extent that it is meaningful to talk of ethnic identity
except in a quite subjective sense, there existed several different ethnic groups within
the late 18th century Swedish realm. Even if we would surmise that patriotic
propaganda and the uniquely efficient centralization of the early-modern Swedish state
would by this time have succeeded in welding together the earlier regional identities –
Westgothians, Dalecarlians, Smallanders, Northlanders and so on – into a unitary
Swedish identity, there were also seven recently conquered provinces populated by
Danes and Norwegians.
7
See my arguments in Emilsson: Before the ‘European Miracles’. Four Studies in Swedish Preconditions
for Conquest, Growth, and Voice. Göteborg 2005 and in ’Jordbrukets kommersialisering och splittringen av
bondeståndet – en uppgörelse med odalbondemyten’ (Forthcoming article in Forskningsfronten flyttas fram
2007).
8
The evidence invoked largely consisted of cranimetric statistics interpreted as indications of languagegroup affinities; in this way prominent Swedish archaeologists and historians could claim to have proved
the descent of contemporaneous Swedes from stone-age Germanic ancestors. As the databases were
manipulated to exclude ‘untypical’ skulls at both ends of the time spectrum, the similarities are hardly
surprising.
Recasting Swedish Historical Identity
195
Today these provinces are considered totally Swedish, but by the time Geijer and
his associates started to formulate a Swedish nationalist discourse, they had only been
under Swedish rule for a century and a half. An efficient carrot-and-stick policy of
harsh indoctrination and civic integration had turned their population into Swedish
citizens, but this result can hardly be interpreted as ethnic homogeneity. Political or
civic homogeneity, perhaps, but it is the ethnic discourse I am questioning. And still I
haven’t even mentioned the Finnish people or the aboriginal Sami. Finland had been an
integral part of Sweden for the better part of a millennium, and their peasants were
represented in the Diet along with those from present-border Sweden. Their noblemen
and burghers were often of non-Finnish descent, but also within Sweden, these estates
contained a considerable proportion of foreign origin: Noblemen and burghers of
German, Baltic, Polish, Scottish, Dutch or French extraction. At the other end of the
status spectrum, there were social outcast categories like gypsies and tattare
(“travellers”). The Jewish element in Sweden has up to the very recent been largely
invisible due to earlier religious discrimination and later wariness of antisemitism, but
the European Union has now given Yiddish minority language status in Sweden, along
with Romani, Finnish, two Sami languages and the Swedish-Finnish borderland idiom
Meänkieli9.
To what extent this kaleidoscopic mixture could be considered more homogeneous
than the populations of any other European country seems highly uncertain. I consider
it an unproven national myth10. To the extent that Swedes have been convinced by this
propaganda, it may have created a subjective homogeneity, but this is surely no
‘national treasure’. On the contrary, it is a national danger, as it may impede
adjustment to reality. The large proportion of recent immigrants might not have the
chance to choose freely between individual and collective integration, or whatever
personal mixture of these strategies they might come up with, if they are always
contrasted with a massive imagined conformity.
In this context another important recent reconsideration of Swedish identity should
also be mentioned: Är svensken människa (“Are Swedes human?”) by Henrik Berggren
and Lars Trägårdh. Their discussion concerns the Swedish self-image – the title is
borrowed from one of their examples out of the large Swedish self-castigating literature
– and their principal and quite convincing thesis is that the Swedish culture is at the
same time extremely individualist and strongly reliant on the state. The explanation of
this seeming paradox, is that the state guarantees our independence from other
collectivities and thus leaves us free to choose our own commitments – and even more
important: our non-commitments. Of course this is more of a utopia than a description
of reality, but an important point is that to many outsiders this type of freedom would
not seem all that attractive. Surprisingly, the authors trace the development of this
radical individualism from the same writer, Erik Gustaf Geijer, who is cited by
9
Which has earlier in general been considered a Finnish dialect, although this official recognition should
support its pretentions to language status.
10
The late (14th century) abolition of slavery in Sweden, and the important role of Swedish vikings in the
European slave-trade,
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Erik Örjan Emilsson
Hagerman as the leading inventor of Swedish conservative nationalism11. In his old age
Geijer had astonished the Swedish public by converting to liberalism, and it is the
radical old man, not the young conservative, that is discussed by Berggren-Trägårdh.
Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, Ellen Key and Alva Myrdal mark the most important
further steps toward statist individualism, although Strindberg and Astrid Lindgren are
also discussed.
The statist-individualist analysis is complemented by something the writers term
“the Swedish theory of love”. According to this ‘theory’ true love can exist only where
the lovers are completely independent of each other. Stated in such a stark form it
sounds almost frighteningly demanding and existentialist, but it is hard to deny that the
line of reasoning sounds familiar to a Swede.
This whole story may sound totally unrelated to Hagerman’s, and in many ways it
is. It is a mentality consistent with the modernist paradigm that is reconstructed by
Berggren-Trägårdh, while Hagerman strives to uncover the hidden remnants of the old
reactionary nationalism. Still, both of these studies are deeply concerned with the
relevance for the present of notions from the past, and in that respect they are
complementary.
A consistent statist-individualist immigration policy would give every immigrant
the chance of formulating his or her own individual version of integration and would
therefore tend to attract those presumptive immigrants who would appreciate a free
choice, whatever their cultural background. This would be in sharp contrast to the
different versions of cultural essentialism, where people are identified with their
cultural background and either are expected to conform to it or demanded to give it up
in favour of full assimilation. The first of those alternatives resembles the British policy
criticized by Amartya Sen12, who makes a forceful case for respecting the individual
identities of immigrants and minority members, as against Tony Blair’s strategy of
negotiating with so-called ‘responsible leaders’ for immigrant communities. The
second alternative resembles the Danish, where the demand for full assimilation leads
to the need of unequivocal criteria for what you are expected to conform to, and thus to
the construction of an increasingly monolithic version of Danishness. As both of these
uncomfortable alternatives correspond to tendencies articulated also in the Swedish
debate, the statist-individualist position might be a constructive basis for a third way.
This should also be more compatible with the ideology of the Swedish welfare
state. This is still often envisioned in the terms of the folkhem (‘people’s home’) vision
from the 1928, when Social Democrat chairman and eventual prime minister Per-Albin
Hansson formulated the almost utopian notion of society as a ‘good home’ for the
people: a home where there are no mistreated stepchildren or pampered favourites.
Eventually, a surprisingly broad consensus formed around this ideal, which was hardly
seriously questioned before the Thatcher revolution started to make an impact on
Swedish politics.
In the present-day debates the limitations of this vision has often been stressed, and
Maja Hagerman at times seems to suggest that the notion of a ‘people’s home’ was
11
The Swedish literature on Geijer is voluminous. For a detailed discussion in English of his role in
formulating Swedish nationalism, see Peter Hall: The social construction of nationalism. Sweden as an
example.Lund 1998.
12
Amartya Sen: Identity and Violence. The Illusion of Destiny. New York 2006
Recasting Swedish Historical Identity
197
only possible because of the imagined consanguinity. This is by no means the only
possible interpretation though. Today the folkhem ideal is most conspicuously
propagated by two diametrically opposed political parties: on the one hand by the
avowed internationalists of the Left-wing Party, and on the other by the crypto-racist
isolationists in the Sweden Democrats. To claim that the people’s home ideal is
premised on the exclusivity of a narrowly bounded nationalism, may amount to a selffulfilling cynicism that concedes the victory before the match has started.
That the vision is compatible with a racist world-view doesn’t mean that it is a
racist notion. From the very beginning, the concept has been ambiguous and contested.
Per-Albin Hansson picked up the catchword from conservatives like Rudolf Kjellén,
and re-charged it with an egalitarian content13. In Hansson’s formulation, the edge was
turned against class injustice, but it might just as well be given an anti-racist
interpretation, if gipsies and travellers are to be counted among the ‘stepchildren’ that
deserve an equal place at the table. The ‘people’s home’ ideal was contested from the
beginning, and could be given a radical turn as well as a conservative one. The struggle
over the right interpretation continues, and if we view it in the light of the Swedish
modernist tradition, it would be most natural to see it as mutable and redefinable. The
open-door version of the ‘people’s home’ ideal that can be found in Olof Palme’s
rhetoric may seem hopelessly idealist and out of date, but even within the context of
the European Union, something along the same lines could offer a much better
comparative advantage to Sweden than would any version of an ethnic definition of
Swedishness. Swedish self-understanding has always had a strong civic component,
resembling the American version of nationalism in that freedom and democratic
participation has been envisioned as a national heritage14. Whatever the level of
exaggerated idealization involved in that viewpoint, there are several characteristics of
Swedish society and culture that are remarkable in a comparative context, and have
deep historical roots: broad popular participation, a high level of legitimacy for the
state, a tradition of constant negotiation, a search for consensus, a deep aversion to
warfare, a moderate rate of inequality and a positive view of change. If Berggren and
Trägårdh are right we could also add a more specific characteristic: a positive view of
the state as the guarantee of our right and ability to be truly individual.
If Sweden no longer heads the ranking-lists in standard of living or economic
growth, we still seem to embrace modernity – or what is now often described as postmodern values – to a higher extent than most other countries. When we discuss
Swedish culture and Swedish traditions, we should not forget that perpetual
modernization has by now become one of our most distinctive traditions.
When I have studied and compared different contemporary theories about Europe’s
historical rise to world dominance, I have found only one real point of consensus. In
one way or another, everyone stressed the dynamic importance of the simultaneous
interaction and independence of the societies that together constitute Europe15. If we
would accept diversity as a fundamental characteristic of Europe – perhaps even the
13
Hans Dahlkvist: ‘Folkhemsbegreppet – Rudolf Kjellén vs Per Albin Hansson’ Historisk Tidskrift 2002:3.
Clearly visible already in the rhetoric of the Peasant Estate during the 17th century: ‘We know that in other
countries, the commonalty is held in thrall, and we fear that the same will befall us, who are yet born a free
people.’ (my translation).
15
Emilsson 1996:8 and 2005:126ff.
14
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Erik Örjan Emilsson
most fundamental one – then every national or regional variant of the European
development should be expected to present its own pecularities, which would constitute
their respective contributions to the diversity of Europe. Such a perspective might lead
to a wariness about unnecessary harmonizations (which could weaken the dynamic
properties of multiplicity), but on the other hand, it would certainly offer no support for
isolationism.
If the search for Sweden’s role in a changing and expanding Europe would make us
turn back towards the conservative nationalism of the young Geijer and abandon the
radical individualism which the old Geijer paved the way for, we would have adapted
to eurosclerosis and missed the opportunity to take an active part in the modernization
of an entire continent, or more. For a country that was once described as the social
laboratory of the world, that would be a sorry ending indeed.